Seems pretty feasible to me - bring a small portable generator (bonus credit if solar-powered) or battery, together with a heat lamp, stand on the sidewalk or street by his yard, and start wilting the grass and whatever other plants are in reach until you get arrested. Even a blowdryer might work, I'm not sure. Nothing that puts out a flame though.

Obviously, Johnson should have no objection to wilting his plants given that the sun will eventually encompass the earth anyway.

If his place is in some gated community, then maybe outside his campaign HQ?

And to be Scrupulously Fair, if Johnson has withdrawn this argument, then don't wilt his plants. His millennial supporters need to know more about his positions though.

Finally, a good point here: continental drift will resolve political problems in the Middle East before the sun moots our response to climate change.

Wow. This from a guy who professes to believe in economics as a guide to life. Doesn't he know that future values are subject to a discount rate? Some use a rate that is a bit too high-- it seems to me we shouldn't accept a policy that leads to the extinction of the human race in a few thousand years just because things would be nicer for those living in the first couple of thousand. But any reasonable discount says we just don't care about what happens in a billion years.

Canman, what makes you think 'next-gen' nuclear is so much better than solar or wind? Costs for those are already competitive (often the lowest on the market) and continue to drop the history of nuclear has been economic failure, over and again, despite huge subsidies. In the late '70s my father (an energy engineer and technical director for the Institute of Man and Resources in Prince Edward Island) proposed a province-wide trial of renewables and energy efficiency measures in PEI. The National Research Council responded by saying they weren't interested because they were betting on nuclear. Today a lot of PEI's power is wind-driven (and with very little subsidy if any), while the Point LePreau nuclear station came in way over-budget and with many maintenance problems.

Actually, current generation nuclear is better than wind and solar. Next gen offers more safety. More production ought to offer more economies of scale and lowering prices. wind and solar are subject to an exponential penetration curve. They might cut a little bit of CO2 and save a little gas at low penetration, but they will always need that gas or something else as backup.

Hey Gary, In millions of years the sun is going to engulf the earth and we'll all be dead. Therefore there's no reason to waste time and money fighting terrorism, or communism, or inheritance taxes either, right?

... the sun will expand and encompass the earth (ed. note: in hundreds of millions of years at earliest).

Try 10 billion years before Sun runs out of Hydrogen and needs to up the notch to the next ring of fusion ... Source: Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, for one, and probably the best. But there are many other sources, e.g., article on red giant branch of the Main Sequence. In fact, Main Sequence stuff is basic Astronomy. The problem with Johnson is he knows something, apparently, about that, although even his timeline is off, since I believe he said 4x10^9 not 10^10 years.

Johnson also flip-flops ... He was advocating a tax on Carbon a couple of weeks ago, and now has disowned it.

If you still think Neil deGrasse Tyson is the best source for ANY astrophysical knowledge you need your head examined. There is a large body of scientific literature on the subject of which Mr. Tyson has contributed very little. He and Bill Nye are crank self publicists. There is not a single reference cite in that article you linked to.

A box of bad cigars is offered for the first photograph of Brian attacking the cactus in Johnson's yard with a solar powered stun gun. Brian should be wearing a wowser of a photovoltaic pith helmet, as even at high noon in New Mexico, it would take a silicon mortarboard four meters on an edge to run a blowdryer.

35 years after the fact , 8c7793aa-15b2-11e5-898a-67ca934bd1df , continues to enjoy the benefits of a document Ronald Reagan signed in 1987, to S.Fred Singer's loud dismay:The Montreal Convention.

I minimize my commercial flying and baggage allotment nowadays, Russel. And I don't quite see what that has to do with this topic.

Maybe you are thinking about the Montreal Convention? Replacing the CFCs with HFCs and calling it a great success and a day? What you don't seem to realize, Russell, is that I was active in science back in those days, active in condensed matter physics, and I am the ZT=3 guy. Just lately in the last few days I have become the gravitational graviton axion Higgs guy as well.

I've seen a low figure of 500 million years from now for when stellar brightening would trigger a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth as happened on Venus. Deliberate manipulation of the climate (instead of our current negligent manipulation) could delay that considerably.

Canman says that solar and wind will always need that gas backup as if 3 story high diesel generators that nuclear is required to have and run daily + weekly + monthly is of course considered NOT a ff 'gas backup' by all nuclear apologists. And thats not to mention all the other 'gas backups' nuclear uses from birth to slow downs to maintenance times and to end of the line decommissioning.

I would recommend Canman take a look at Mark Jacobson's work: all renewable by 2050, with no fossil fuel backup and energy prices comparable to (slightly lower than) BAU scenarios. Seems the confidence with which pro-nuclear advocates belittle the potential of renewables is about as defensible as their facile treatment of the long and very disappointing history of nuclear power just not working out as advertised. (I was a fan once myself.)

Make what up, BBD? Emerging widespread interest in space colonization (outside of America), or the fact that we only have four billion years to solve the problem? Gary Johnson is merely jumping on the bandwagon to grab the 1000 or so space cadet votes. Get back to me after Tuesday.

Canman, citing McIntyre puts your comments in a different light for me. Ignoring them seems the most reasonable response. I spent some time a while ago following through the 'hockey stick' dispute: McIntyre's errors were very serious (unlike Mann's).

Canman: in practice nuclear doesn't generally work at anything like 90% of capacity. You should also note that that in the USA capacity factor is calculated on the basis of " net summer capacity" which is lower than net winter capacity because the cooling water is warmer. This inflates the capacity factor.

In fact, in recent years, production of electricity by nukes has had to be curtailed because the cooling water in summer has been too warm.

The back up generator requirements are exaggerated. Wind and solar are relatively well predictable. In Germany you can see that the day ahead price is a pretty good fit to actual price. You can also see the merit order effect lowering the wholesale price of electricity as renewables kick in: https://www.energy-charts.de/price.htm

Canman, can you tell me why the consistent and consilient body of evidence, derived from multiple lines of evidence, yielding a global consensus, doesn't make you look like the denialist crank that you are?

Canman - M&M's hockey stick 'selection' were a cherry picked 100 out of 10,000.M&M conflated PC1 with the overall reconstructionM&M failed to note the bias of using a short-centered PCA was minimalM&M wrongly assumed the noise component of the proxies, absent any climatic signal, had the same auto-correlation characteristics as the proxy series themselvesMcIntyre claimed that his ARFIMA scheme was validated by Wegman using AR1 (Wegman didn't use AR1 - he used M&M's code - a fact McIntyre well knew).

All of this is spelled out in detail in Deep Climate's exploration of the Wegman Report. It's really hard to believe this many years later people still haven't caught on.

I once read a review by a prominent skeptic skeptic (possibly Michael Shermer) of a long book by a ID/creationist (possibly William Demski). The main point was that the creationist was offering a huge volume of technical sounding verbiage and talking points so that the creationists who browsed through it could feel that evolution had been debunked. I think Deep Climate is serving an equivalent role for McIntyre's critics. I would also say the same thing about that website that supposedly debunks Bjorn Lomborg.

Canman - So, you ask for short simple points, but when provided you .... can't refute a single one of them and *still* maintain your original view. I suggest you take Arnold Palmer's advice to the weekend duffer, throw away your clubs.

"M&M's hockey stick 'selection' were a cherry picked 100 out of 10,000." He was picking illustrative examples!

"M&M conflated PC1 with the overall reconstruction". Take out PC1 and Gaspe and there's no hockey stick!

"M&M failed to note the bias of using a short-centered PCA was minimal". Only if you include the 4rth PC!

"M&M wrongly assumed the noise component of the proxies, absent any climatic signal, had the same auto-correlation characteristics as the proxy series themselves". They were showing that Mann's method, which mines hockey sticks, mines hockey sticks!Do you think giving them the same auto-correlation characteristics is going to stop Mann's method, which mines hockey sticks, from mining hockey sticks?

"McIntyre claimed that his ARFIMA scheme was validated by Wegman using AR1 (Wegman didn't use AR1 - he used M&M's code - a fact McIntyre well knew)". Too much hare-splitting minutia to go into!

"All of this is spelled out in detail in Deep Climate's exploration of the Wegman Report. It's really hard to believe this many years later people still haven't caught on." It's really pathetic to watch Deep Climate, Supermandia, Caerbannog, ...etc get all excited because varying some parameter of the red noise that is sent through Mann's method, which mines hockey sticks, can cause it to mine littler hockey sticks!

Ewi Wabbett,

"Canman, just google Moyhu McIntyre and take your pick." Sorry, I don't want to end up like this:

BBD, Mann's hockey stick had the flattest handle in all of Hockeystickdom and it can no longer be shown in IPCC reports!

It was the first millennial reconstruction. It wasn't perfect *but* it was close: cooling from 1000CE to 1850CE then a huge upward trend. All subsequent work has confirmed the conclusion of MBH99, which bears repeating (emphasis as original):

Although NH reconstructions prior to about AD 1400 exhibit expanded uncertainties, several important conclusions are still possible. While warmth early in the millennium approaches mean 20th century levels, the late 20th century still appears anomalous: the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium. More widespread high-resolution data which can resolve millennial-scale variability are needed before more confident conclusions can be reached with regard to the spatial and temporal details of climate change in the past millennium and beyond.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.